


With Love, Forever

by as_with_a_sunbeam



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: 1797, 1804, Aftermath, Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, The Reynolds Pamphlet, burn - Freeform, duel, to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-06
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-28 08:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11413845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/as_with_a_sunbeam/pseuds/as_with_a_sunbeam
Summary: Eliza burned many of her love letters after Hamilton confessed to his affair. But what happened to the rest?





	With Love, Forever

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: some description of a dead body in the last section, but nothing too graphic.

**Summer 1797**

 

The maid had been confused when Eliza requested the fire be lit in the middle of a sweltering summer day, but her protruding belly is enough to forestall any questions. Once the fire is crackling in the grate, she crosses out of the parlor to her husband’s office. When she pushes open the office door, she finds him sitting at his desk with a quill held loosely in his hand. He looks up immediately, his bright, damp eyes wide with guilt. He’s been looking at her like that ever since he confessed his affair to her.

Ignoring his big eyes, she steps fully the room, reaches into his first drawer in his desk, and rifles through the papers until she finds the stack of letters towards the back tied neatly with a bright red ribbon. She carries the stack back to the sitting room.

“Eliza?” she hears him ask, trailing a few steps behind her as she makes her way across the small townhouse and kneels, slowly and awkwardly to allow for her bulging middle, beside the fireplace. “Eliza, what are you doing?”

She unties the ribbon and opens the first letter. Her own messy scrawl greets her eyes, the date in the corner placing it from February of 1780. She places it on the fire, watches the flames swallow the paper and ink.

Hamilton makes a noise behind her. Not so much a protest as a cry of pain that’s been stifled. She ignores him, opens the next letter, and places it in the fire as well. She repeats the motions methodically until the whole stack is consumed.

She looks down at the ribbon in her hands. She’d given it to him as a token after he’d called at her aunt and uncle’s for the first time. Softly, so softly she almost misses it, he whispers, “No.”

With cold satisfaction, she places the ribbon in the fire as well. It takes longer to burn, curling, turning black, smoking heavily.

At last, she stands and turns back to her husband. He’s pale to the lips and shaking slightly. The guilt in his eyes is overshadowed at last. Heartbreak, she decides distantly.

She brushes by him without a word.

 

**Summer 1803**

The trip to Albany had been draining on every level. Her beloved mother’s death was a difficult blow. Instead of grieving properly, she’d been forced to shove aside her own feelings and try to keep her father from sinking into a pit of overwhelming despair. All this, while tending to her one year old son. The letters from her husband had hardly been a solace. He’d been much more concerned with how she acted around her father than with how she was dealing with the grief herself. She felt as bitter towards him as anyone at the moment.

She wasn’t due home for another two days, but she couldn’t sit in her father’s house acting cheerful anymore. She caught the stagecoach rather than the sloop she’d planned to take. After a grueling days long trip, dirty and near perishing from the heat, she dragged herself into the house, the baby asleep on her shoulder and her day bag feeling twice as heavy as when she’d left.

The other children were all at school, their studies or otherwise being cared for in her absence, so she takes advantage of the quiet house and goes straight upstairs to lie down. Settling the baby into his crib in the nursery, she sighs in relief when he stays asleep. She heads for her own bed. When she enters her room, she hears noises coming from the dressing room and pokes her head around the corner, just in time to see her husband stuffing a stack of letters into an old shoe box at the back of his wardrobe.

He turns quickly, visibly startled by her entrance, but pastes a smile on immediately.

“Eliza,” he greets. “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

 _Clearly_ , she stops herself from retorting.

“Welcome home, my love,” he adds, coming forward and embracing her.

She stands stiffly while he holds her, her mind spinning. He’d kept the letters from that girl. What if he was writing her again? Or someone else, someone new? Why else would he secrete papers in the back of his wardrobe?

“I didn’t think you’d be at home,” she says when he finally releases her.

“I’m working from my office here for today. I was just writing briefs, and I wanted to stay near the children,” he tells her. “Unfortunately, I’ll need to go to town tomorrow. I would have arranged my schedule better if I’d known you were coming home early.”

“It’s fine,” she says curtly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m rather fatigued from the journey….”

A flash of hurt comes over his face, followed by confusion, but he nods. “I’ll leave you to your rest.”

He left just after dawn the next day on business, and Eliza wastes no time in digging the box out of the wardrobe. Her hand hovers over the lid, afraid of what she’ll find. She hesitates another moment, then pulls back the lid, desperate to know.

A small stack of letters sat inside, held neatly together with a plain piece of string. She pulls off the top letter and sees her own handwriting staring back at her. A letter from three years ago reporting on the children’s health and weather in New York. She pulls out the next and again sees her own writing. Every letter in the little stack a letter from her. Each is fairly recent, but starting to wear from handling.

The one on top is more worn than the others, a letter from a year ago, that she’d signed to him “with all my love.” The phrase was smudged so as to be barely legible. She placed her hand over the crinkled edge where he’d held it, sized up the distance, and realized with a pang that he’d likely stroked his thumb over it so often the ink had begun to run.

She wonders for a moment why he’d taken to stroking this particular letter. She’s sure she’s ended a thousand notes to him the same way. Yet, looking back through the letters, she can’t find a single other one with the phrase.

It hits her suddenly, all at once, what had happened to all those other letters bearing her love to him. She’s never given it much thought before. She prizes his letters to her, but his letters are masterpieces, works of art. Her letters are awkward and messy and misspelled. No one could miss them, not really. Sitting here with her new letters, careworn and smudged from handling, she begins to think she was wrong in her estimation of their value.

She imagines the scene reversed: imagines trailing after Hamilton and watching him throw all his love letters to her in the fire. Watching him take back all that history, all that love. The idea steals her breath for a moment; the thought of him murdering her is less painful.  

She remembers his face from all those years ago—pale, his whole body quaking slightly. And now he’s taken to hiding her letters, as though afraid she’ll repeat her action in another fit of anger.

She’s never before thought of herself as cruel. She'd wanted to hurt him when she'd burned those letters. Wanted him to feel as broken and betrayed as she did. The scars of his actions remain to this day. Their relationship is forever changed, but healing slowly.  She finds she now regrets erasing that history.

When he comes home that night, she greets him at the door and immediately wraps her arms around him. He seems happy, if a little surprised, and he holds her to him gently.

“I have something for you,” she tells him, pulling away slightly but reluctant to let go entirely.

“What’s the occasion?” he asks, smiling brightly. His face falls slightly right after though, and she can see him panicking internally, running through important dates in his mind.

“No occasion,” she assures him. “I just found something today that I thought you should have.”

She holds out the silky blue ribbon she’d kept in her jewelry box for the past twenty odd years. She’d worn it on her wedding day, but it had more significance than that. He takes it, running it through his fingers and looking at her curiously.

“I was wearing it in my hair on the night we first danced together. In Morristown,” she explains. “I thought you might like to have it as a keepsake.”

His hand clenches tightly around the ribbon and his eyes go bright, glittering in the lamp light. “Thank you,” he says softly.

She can’t replace the red ribbon or the letters or the history she’d taken from him. They can only go forward now. So she gives him a new keepsake and vows always to end her letters to him with her love.

 

**Summer 1804**

A day after she loses her husband, Eliza manages to pull herself from her bed. She opens his wardrobe and digs around until she finds the little box in the back. Opening the lid once more, she finds a heftier stack of correspondence all neatly held together with her blue ribbon. The careworn letter is still on the top, her message of love now utterly illegible.

Tears fill her eyes as she looks at the letters he’d kept with such care. Her sainted husband, always so sensitive, so tender. It kills her now, that she was the reason he held these little missives so dear, tucked away from the world at the back of his closet, that no one could steal them away again.

She holds them close all the way to New York City. She steps out of the carriage in the bright glaring sunlight of a July afternoon, the heat stifling and all the worse for the layers of black now engulfing her. Her sister’s townhouse seems to loom before her, and she takes a breath before walking to the door.  

The distinctive smell of death permeates the sitting room even though the casket is closed. Many men are standing around, speaking softly, but the room goes silent when she enters. John charges forward when he sees her. “My dear sister, I didn’t know you were here.”

“Open it,” she commands, pushing through the crowd to stand before the casket.

“That’s not…” he hesitates, looking pale. She hears the footsteps of the other men retreating from the room. “It’s just…with the doctor’s exam and the heat….”

“Open it,” she says again firmly. “And then give me a few moments alone with my husband.”

He obeys at last, opening the heavy lid and leaving her be. The smell is even worse now. Her Hamilton has gone putrid from the late summer heat, helped along by being sliced open on an autopsy table the day before. The incisions are covered by his uniform, but she can tell that he’s bloated beneath the fabric. She forces her eyes to his face: still handsome, still whole.

She gazes at his face for a long time. When she reaches out to touch him, she finds his skin cold. She drags her finger along his cheekbone, feeling the stubble that has sprouted since his passing. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his one last time.  

Fighting a sob, she lifts one of his hands from his chest and places the stack of letters underneath it. They are his, as surely as she is his, for all eternity. She lowers the heavy lid on the casket herself. Not even she could take them away from him now.

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to Burn while I was stuck in traffic on my way home, and I was reminded of this story I'd written awhile back. It doesn't fit neatly with most of my other stories, but I still like the theory. No one knows exactly what happened to Eliza's letters, but the prevailing wisdom is she destroyed them after Ham died, following Martha Washington's example. (Thankfully, unlike Mrs. Washington, she couldn't seem to bring herself to destroy his letters to her.)
> 
> However, as I was considering LMM's theory from Burn, that she destroyed them after the affair, it begged the question, what happened to her later letters? She must have written to him at some point after 1797, right? And then this idea occurred to me- maybe she gave them back to him. (Yeah, sorry.) 
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! All feedback is greatly appreciated!!


End file.
